Contact centers (also referred to as call centers) are used by various organizations to provide communication channels to the organizations' customers. For example, various organizations may utilize contact centers so that customers may contact the organizations with regard to issues customers may be having with the organizations' products and/or to place orders for the organizations' products. Typically, a contact center employs a number of agents that assist customers who have contacted the contact center. However, in many instances, the contact center may receive more calls than it has agents currently available to handle the calls. Therefore, the contact center may make use of one or more queues for holding calls until agents become available to handle the calls.
With that said, a queue at a contact center can build up to a point that the wait time for an available agent for any one call held in the queue becomes increasingly longer. As a result, calling parties may become impatient and/or frustrated, resulting in the parties hanging up and abandoning the calls. These abandoned calls can lead to missed opportunities for the contact center to converse (do business) with these calling parties as well as create bad will on the part of frustrated calling parties with respect to the contact center.
Over the last few years, the contact center industry has attempted to address these abandoned calls by placing callback calls at later times when agents are available to calling parties who have abandoned calls while waiting for available agents. However, because such a call is initiated by the contact center, a calling party may not always be available to receive a callback call when it is placed by the contact center or it may be an inconvenient time for the calling party to take the call. Thus, a need in the industry exists to improve the process for handling excessive calls being held in an inbound queue while waiting in the queue, as well as abandoned calls, to ensure a higher success rate for establishing contact with the parties associated with such calls. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure herein is presented.